Monday, 20 August 2012

I've very briefly mentioned in passing our prolific bananas in a previous post, but the annual flowering of the beautiful Cup of Gold Vine, one of my favourite plants (which has just happened within the past few days) encouraged me to share a few photos of our garden. Underneath each photo I've put: Latin name / English name / French or Reunion Creole name.

The frangipani is another one of my sweet-smelling favourites, although you don't have to wait for nightfall to appreciate it. Different varieties exist but as you can see ours has large white flowers with a small yellow centre. When the flowers fall I sometimes float them in a bowl of a water.

The Traveller's palm is originally from Madagascar and is not a true palm, but a member of the bird-of-paradise family. The name supposedly comes from the fact that the sheaths of the stems hold rainwater, which theoretically could be used as an emergency water supply for thirsty travellers.

The Allamanda is also known as Yellow Bell, Golden Trumpet or Buttercup Flower. We have two different varieties in our garden - one with large flowers (see bottom left and right), and one with small flowers (see middle and top left of photo):

Allamanda / Buttercup Flower / Coupe d'Or or Trompette d'Or

The Jungle Geranium is also known as Flame of the Woods (I prefer the latter name). Its latin name, Ixora, derives from that of an Indian deity, from where it originates.

We've planted our own mango tree (see first picture below) but it's still young and to be honest the one in our neighbour's garden hanging over the back wall gives us more fruit! In Reunion the fruit are ripe in summer between November and April, depending on the variety. The main cultivars found in Reunion are Carotte, José, Lucie, Auguste, Maison Rouge and Earlygold.

Mangifera indica / Mango / Mangue

neighbour's mango tree

We grew our avocado tree from a pit and it's still quite young. Last year there were lots of flowers but no fruit. This year at the time of writing there are lots of flowers once again - maybe this time we'll have some avocados? (By the way the French word for avocado - avocat - is the French word for a lawyer. I've seen some very funny menu and recipe automatic machine translations on the internet along the lines of "add 100g of chopped lawyer"!).

Persea americana / Avocado / Avocat

Our red hibiscus doesn't flower very often, but when it does I think the flowers are magnificent.

Hibiscus / Hibiscus / Hibiscus

The nastus bamboo is known locally as calumet, and my husband particularly appreciates it as he grew up in a house called "Les Calumets" where there were many in the garden.

Nastus borbonicus / Nastus bamboo / Calumet

Another one of my fragrant favourites, the strong-smelling ylang-ylang is used in perfumery and is grown widely in the Comoros Islands and Mayotte also known as the Perfumed Islands for this reason. The flower is pale yellow and can be seen in the middle of this picture:

Cananga odorata / Ylang-ylang / Ylang-ylang

This Copperleaf was planted by one of our tenants when we rented our house out for three years while we were in S. Korea.

Acalypha / Copperleaf / Foulard

Bougainvillea are an attractive flowering plant, but beware their thorns!

Bougainvillea / Bougainvillea / Bougainvillier or Bougainvillée

This papaya has been chopped down since I took the photo - neither my husband or I are big fans of papaya and the tree was starting to get in the way. We didn't even plant it - it probably grew from seeds dropped by a bird. Although it looks like a tree it's actually just a big plant - it grows several metres high very quickly and the trunk is hollow.

Carica papaya / Papaya or Pawpaw / Papaye

I think these Amaryllis were planted by our tenants when we lived in South Korea. We just leave them alone and they flower every year.

Amaryllis

Finally I thought I'd take you through the various stages of growth of bananas. Here are baby banana plants:

Like papaya, bananas are plants and not trees. They grow to be several metres tall:

Each plant produces one banana heart:

reddish-purple banana heart

Over a period of several months the bananas develop from this heart:

In the picture below the fruit have all developed, but still have several weeks or even a couple of months before they're ripe. In Reunion the heart, known locally as a babafigue, is sometimes cut and used to make a carri(savoury Creole dish).

We normally cut a stalk when one of the bananas has just turned yellow, or is on the point of doing so. If we don't, the birds will get to them first! (Note that the fruit grow upwards, and not downwards as some supermarkets would have you believe).

freshly-cut stalk

Once the stalk of fruit has been cut the plant dies and we cut it down, however offshoots often develop from the base of the plant and the whole process starts all over again!

ripening stalk

Believe it or not all the banana photos above were taken on the same day; we always seem to have several stalks on the go in various stages of ripeness. Sometimes we have so many bananas I feel I should be selling them by the side of the road, like this lady I saw in Sri Lanka.

Monday, 13 August 2012

Mention scuba diving in Iceland to most people and - divers themselves or not - they'll look at you like you're mad and give a shiver. But during the week we spent in Iceland this is exactly what we did for three days!

Þingvallavatn contains very cold (3-4°C) but incredibly clear water, which has taken 30-100 years to filter through lava fields from melting glaciers. It's technically drinkable although I have to admit I didn't try it.

Divers are attracted by the fantastic visibility and the geological curiosity of the site - there's not many places in the world where you can dive between (and touch) two tectonic plates. These plates are moving apart at a rate of about 2cm per year.

Silfra has been placed on the top five diving destinations list by many diving publications. Visibility can reach end-of-sight and is rated at 150 to 300 metres.

one of only two fish we saw during our Silfra dives

Silfra's deepest known point is 63 metres.

the other fish!

The extreme cold means dives generally only last 30 minutes. However after a surface interval we did the same dive again, and visibility was even better the second time as there were no other divers around (all the photos are actually from the first dive).

bright green wispy algae

Towards the end of the dive you turn into Silfra Lagoon, which is very shallow (about 5m) but quite wide: 120 metres.

in the lagoon

in the lagoon

The far side of the lagoon marks the exit point from the dive site, and from there it's a short (but breathless) hike back to the car park for a warm drink.

In 2000 two major earthquakes led to 20% of the lake's water disappearing, and it was noticed that the lake held submerged hot springs. The water level is now back to its previous level, for divers delight!

You don't need to dive very deep to see the bubbling springs - our maximum depth on this dive was only 8m.

Kleifarvatn's bubbling lake bed

This was our warmest dive in Iceland - water temperature at the surface was 16°C, and 13°C a few metres below.

Kleifarvatn's bubbling lake bed

At one place a dark, mysterious, seemingly bottomless hole has opened up - our dive guide told us it wasn't there a few months before.

If this is what the lake does to fish, what will it do to me?!

But only after diving did our dive guide tell us the legend about a worm-like creature the size of a whale who lurks in the lake - the local equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster!

For my husband and I it reminded us of one of dives in Pulau Weh (Sumatra) when we dived on similar hot springs in another very volcanic part of the world.

fascinating to watch

Still on the peninsula, our second dive of the day should have been in the sea near an aluminium smelting plant at Hafnarfjörður, however heavy swell and poor visibility meant we ended up aborting the dive.

dive site near Hafnarfjörður

Our third and final day of diving was long but worth while. We set off at 6am for a 5 hour drive to the fjord of Eyjafjordur in Northern Iceland to dive geothermal chimneys at a site known as Strytan.

illustration showing Eyjafördur geothermal chimneys

We set off from the tiny port of Hjalteyri, a small fishing village founded in the late 19th century.

jellyfish in the port, Hjalteyri

The geothermal chimneys are remarkable in that they are the world's only undersea chimneys that can be explored using conventional (i.e. scuba) diving equipment. (Similar chimneys elsewhere in the world are at depths of 2000m or more). They are also home to an abundance of thermophilic organisms, some found nowhere else in the world.

the descent

The chimneys are continuously growing, the tallest of them currently towers around 60m above the seabed; its summit is about 15 metres below the surface. Although the chimneys are government-protected areas sightseeing diving is allowed, but you must proceed with great care.

the top of the tallest chimney appears

The photo below isn't at an angle - the fish actually swim with their heads pointing downwards, presumably because of the chimney's freshwater current.

The chimneys are made of siliceous deposits. Hot, mineral-rich freshwater originating from the Icelandic highlands rises at a rate of up to 100 litres per second through the seabed, creating new crust (up to 300 tons per year) when the hot freshwater meets the cold sea.

close-up of the chimney

The freshwater coming from the chimney has a pH of 10 and a temperature of 72-75°C and is apparently 1100 years old.

soft coral

Water temperature during the dive was about 9-10°C at the surface and 7°C at 30m.

We then had a brief surface interval in our boat (during which we saw a whale) before diving on another geothermal cone site known as Arnarnesstrytur (or 'French Gardens').

Eyjafordur

surface interval

Arnarnesstrytur is a group of much smaller cones at depths from 18 to 46 metres.

cone at Arnarnesstrytur

The cones themselves range is size from 0.5 to 12 metres high; we dived on the shallowest cone at 18m, from which hot water at 78°C streamed.

Strytan and Arnarnesstrytur are the only two protected underwater areas in Iceland. Strytan protected area is 200m in radius, and Arnarnesstrytur protected area (2007) is 400 x 1000m.

What was fascinating to me on this dive were the aggressive purple-blue wolffish - I'd never seen anything like them. They made me think of a human face stuck on a fish body - rather like drawings on those ancient maps labelled "here be sea monsters".

Atlantic wolffish

In Iceland the species is called steinbítur, which translates literally as "stone biter". I don't know about stone, but one certainly tried biting our dive guide's buttocks!

Atlantic wolffish

We also saw lumpsuckers guarding their eggs.

Face to face with a lumpsucker

Lumpsucker seen from the side

soft coral

After our two dives it was time to make a quick trip to Akureyri (Iceland's second city - population 17000) for a late lunch before heading back to Reykjavik. Amazingly, because of the long summer days although we left Reykjavik at 6am and arrived back at 10pm it was light all day long.

jellyfish

Our Icelandic dives were definitely amongst the most memorable we've ever done. Our incredible underwater experiences there more than made up for any cold we might have felt.

About Me

Brit born expat, professional French to English translator (http://smart-translate.info), traveller (59 countries and counting!), scuba diver, hiker, reader, tea drinker. As of 2015 I have lived on Reunion Island for a total of about 20 years since 1990; also lived in Seoul, South Korea 2008-2011.